The Ambassador Team has been busy making changes in the last month

We said farewell to Tony Garratt on Friday 22 August 2015 and hello to Theresa O’Connell.

Theresa starts with The Partnership on Tuesday, 01 September and will soon be visiting you to introduce herself and begin working with you to make the streets a safer and better place to work and visit.

Theresa’s primary role will be business engagement, promoting the events and activities being introduced by The Fitzrovia Partnership. This will include encouraging businesses to become more aware of Business Watch and the Radio Link scheme.

She looks forward to meeting you soon!

The Ambassador Team have been busy reporting over 68 issues affecting the streets in our area over the last month.

Wojciech Wojteczek has weekly workarounds with the Borough Monitoring Officer to identify hotspot areas where fly tipping is an issue, which has resulted in fly tipping in the area reducing over the last month with only 16 reports made to Camden Council.

We have reported 18 instances of begging to the police and to the Camden Safer Street Team and these individuals have been moved supported by the authorities.

The team continue to remove graffiti or tagging stickers from street furniture, with 47 removed.

We continue to remove prostitute advertising cards from the public phone boxes in the area, with 1419 cards removed with the quantity of replacement cards being reduced. The police have arrested another carder and further targeted operations aimed at the carders will follow.

The team have performed the first audit of public phone boxes, detailing damage and graffiti, the details have been forwarded to the phone companies asking for repairs to be carried out.

The voluntary agreement between The Fitzrovia Partnership and the PFRA regarding street fund raisers is delivering results. There have been 31 visits to Tottenham Court Road in August, we identified 1 who had failed to make a request and they were removed. We have also made a number of reports against fund raisers operating who were not acting as per the agreement and penalty points were issued against these companies.

Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour

The most recent figures supplied by the Bloomsbury Police Safer Neighbourhoods Team show how theft has affected the area over the last 6 months. The figures are dropping month on month and we hope that by working in partnership we will see a continued drop.

Also of note is the fact that although we know that many retail premises suffer from incidents of shoplifting these are not being reported to the police.

Help us reduce crime in the area and join our next Business Watch Meeting. At our last meeting we began sharing photographs of suspects of crime and anti-social behaviour operating in the Fitzrovia BID area.

Our next meeting will be held on Monday, 14 September 2015 at The Rising Sun Public House, Tottenham Court Road at 1500. The police, Camden Community Wardens and Camden Business Against Crime all attend the meeting and offer support and advice to businesses as well as identifying concerns that our partners may have been unaware of.

Fitzrovia Operations Group Meeting

The Fitzrovia Partnership has identified a need for a regular meeting of our partners operating in the area to identify specific issues of concern and then to work together to resolve these issues. The police, borough monitoring officer, highways manager, Safer Streets Team and ourselves all attend the meeting which has the support of Camden Council.

UK Threat Level

The current threat level from international terrorism for the UK is assessed as SEVERE.

The threat level for Northern Ireland-related terrorism is set separately for Northern Ireland and Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland). In Northern Ireland it is SEVERE and in Great Britain MODERATE.

To help our members to create continuity plans in the event of a serious incident we are providing the FREE Project Argus – Contingency planning training courses on 20 October, 0930-1300.